Loooong Weekend

Well, here is a quick update of the long weekend: Aforeblogged about dating fiasco straightened out. Was taken not jsut to grille out with the other couple but a whole crowd of folks, most if not all of whom already knew girl and were paired off. So, as Agent as mentioned, I was taken out in public. Another date is in the works for Thursday probably, then Buffett concert in a week. The rest of the weekend went as follows: fiasco scheduling began Friday, I drank a 6 pack of Bass and packed it in for the night around 1. Did house stuff Saturday like wiring the bedroom stereo (the old faithful set most are familiar with). Recaptured the apartment fan, and painted the ceiling of the garage. All painting now done. Went out Saturday night with a friend nad stared at lots of nice scenery at a couple venues in Southend and Uptown while avoiding Speed Street crowds. Yesterday, Coca Cola 600. Drank from 11:30 through end of race (you can take beer in) . Got seperated from the crowd I was with early as there were plenty of seats and the one I ended up in was in roughly the right area. Started walkin back to car after race, still seperated. Became directionally challenged but knew of the main road I needed to be on. Started walking and later jogging once I was on the road with only cars passing me. Cell phone rendered useless due to high volume of calls. Was picked up about 6-7 miles into my voyage "home" by one of the car loads of people I had been with, approximately an hour and half after race. I think I am now known as Forrest Gump with those guys. Home and passed out in bed around 1. Woke up with Wal-Mart feet/legs from the journey and took it easy msot of the day. Trying to swap out fans this afternoon. Would be easy if the existing one would come off the damn ceiling. Put up some window shears in the front foyer around the door. Putting an end to any voyerism. Any suggestions on how to remove the initial mount of a suspended ceiling fan owuld be appreciate. Thing doesn't twist and there are no accessible screws that I can find. Much more frustration and there may be a rather hefty drywall repair bill for ripping it out in unconventional manners. Heilmann stopped in with the Missues to get the car as I was about to leave. He was little lighter in step. I wonder why? That brings us back to the date thing and being in public. Typical Wha events already cleared for the weekend so it was a safe bet for her. That's it. Hope everyone else had a great weekend, all in all, I can't complain.

Try, Try Again

Well, tonight is on after 3 reschedules starting with last Friday night. Grilling out with girl and one of her best friends and that girls boyfriend. Sounds to me like a couples thing. Does that mean we are a couple? I don't have a freakin clue but being brought around the friends has to be a good sign. Watch for an update later to see how things went. Until then, I have more house work to do though great strides have been made.

Alrighty then

So, you can't beat a Friday date that turns into a Saturday date that turns into Saturday lunch that turns into Monday date. Yeah, that's fun when you are actually in town and had tried to plan accordingly. Stuff happens but damn. Oh, nad when you read this, don't think it became this wonderful weekend with another perosn, those are reschedules. I better get rewarded for patience in the not so distant future otherwise, I'm taking this show back on the road.

Interns

I love interns. Not in the Monica and Bill kind of way. We have one for the summer. We had one two years ago but he didn't have much personality. The new one is a local Charlotte kid who is an M.E. at Clemson right out of his Sophomore year. Seems to be picking up what we do around here quickly, fits in with the craziness and wears Orange on Friday's (along with other days). The best part is he does my bitch work. All the little things that take more time than I have to invest but he contractor likes, he gets it done. The icing on the cake is we made him the Bojangles runner this morning. A job typically reserved for me and my hang-over Friday antics. He is still not of legal age however but having been in his position before, I have a feeling I will be taking care of the ocassional bee double E, are you in, this summer. Good stuff.

Class Post II

As reported by a UK site Monday, Verizon is close to gaining rights to a 45% stake in itself held by European Telecom giant Vodafone. The deal is supposedly worth about $56B. Sadly, I had to go to the second page of google to find even this as hits on "Verizon" get lots of kickups on their retail online sites for various products along with numerous venues around the country where they have naming rights. No kickbacks on the recent NSA "scandal" and definitely no mention of it on their site. I don't think this is going away but until the accusers have some hard evidence I don't know how much we will be hearing. On a brighter note, it looks like they are coming out with some new Motorola. The QTM will be exclusive to Verizon customers and is "much anticipated." We will see.

Class Post 1

For the regular readers feel free to comment or do the normal, read through, and move on. You will see the "class post" a few times over the coming weeks as weare doing blogs for one of my grad school classes. Now for the meat of this post.

As we are covering current events in class and how they may affect management policy, I will be interested to see how the NSA issues work out with Bell South, AT&T, and Verizon. Verizon today announced they were only providing documentation in accordance with the law. Bell South has made similar comments, leaving AT&T as the only one of the three to not deny some form of shady involvement. Read more here. Not surpisingly Verizon's stock is down due to the knee jerk reaction of Wall Street, however, there could be a number of hefty lawsuits regarding privacy from this, depending on how it washes out. I will be keeping an eye on things and posting updates and my thoughts as we go.

You got booted

Most people are familiar with the song they play on American Idol when someone gets kicked off. "Bad Day" It getsa lot of airplay on the Top 40 and Adult Contemp radio channels. More than I care for though the song can be quite fitting from time to time. Suprisingly, since I have been living on my own for a month or so, I have been able to avoid that song at least once a week. Of little shock it's at then end of that show that I no longer get my dose. Don't get me wrong, Pickler was hot, dumb blonde and the McPhever chich is rediculously sexy but I just don't care for the show. Other than a couple Kelly Clarkson songs, what has it really produced? Not a whole damn lot.
Anyway, most of the last paragraph has been a random tangent not related to this post. My day has been crap.Stayed at the office until 7ish, came home and still have an hours work to do only so I can get up early and go back to work to get out this quote (that I will type myself, thank god I am one of 5 sales people in the office proficient enough to do so) but that is not the issue. Today's mail was packed. Lots of the nomal crap and some I was expecting. Of the crap was a Williams Sonoma catalog. Cool kitchen shit that I can't afford or even afford to finance. Pipe dreams. That was fun to skim through. The others, coupons. Not just any coupon though, 20% off at Bed and Bath. Not the crappy one purchase thing we got in the mail, but the whole damn purchase. Yeah, so that would have started offsetting the other. I won't say the number but let you math wizards or calculator owners figure it out. Due to previously mentioned incident, my car insurance is officially upa factor of 4, inclusive of my copolicy discounts, etc. The base was somewhere in the $400/6 month range. You do the math. So between the coin I will be forking out (expected, but not at this level ) and the coin I didn't save because the coupon vendors are about a month late (who lives without most of this shit or without updating if they had already planned on it for that long) I am not in a happy mood. I'm celebrating tonights glory with a tall Jack and Ginger or 5. If ya hear me, raise a glass. If ya don't, raise one to "Fuck It" or go away.

Oh yeah, and other stuff isn't going the way I hoped unless I got a really good phone message while I was posting this. Again, fuck it.

Had Enough

OK, I've been relatively quiet on here for a while now. Posted some comments in the Stack, on the Hate Capacitor, and on the Agents site but nothing full blown on here. I've hear enough of this bashing of oil companies now all you Commie pinkos and tree huggers are gonna get it.
The prices are up, yes. GET OVER IT. Just because you are paying $60 bucks to fill up your SUV don't bitch at me about it. I am too. If it bothers you that much, go get a Kia Rio or the new little Chinese thing about to hit the market. Yeah, didn't think you would. You wanna know why they are making more money, it's a combination of things, so quit bitching about how you paying at the pump is padding their pockets and read on for a moment.
Oil companies don't just make three grades of unleaded gas. For example, everyone's favorite "crooks," "gougers," "thieves," etc. Make the following products:
Fuel for automobiles, aviation, and marine transportation vehicles.
Lubricants for the the same transportation sectors (motor oils, gear greases, etc), basestocks for conversion to other products by third parties, synthetic lubricants, metal processing fluids, paper machine oils, compressor oils (refrigeration), hydraulic oils/fluids, turbine oils (power production) and others.
Chemicals (now this one is very broad so I will hit the high spots) including polyethylene, plastomers, polypropylene, elastomers, alcohols, and products used for aromasizing and dearomatizing fluids, just.
Basically if it is a direct or by-product of oil, they are in the industry. Does this mean that anything that is a lubricant, fuel, or plastic is made by ExxonMobile, BP, Royal Dutch Shell or ChevronTexaco, no. They do pump a large percentage of crude from the ground and even the Dow's and Duponts of the world have to get their fix from somewhere. Even the smaller energy firms are getting their share. Take for example Penn-Virginia Corporation. The stock was in the mid $20's in summer of '02. Today it is at about $74.50 or so. This companies core businesses include oil and natural gas exploration and production as well as land management for coal properties from which they obtain royalties on coal and timber production by lessees. They are the primary stake holder in Penn-Virginia Resource Partners, L.P. who announced yesterday a $25.1M distributable cash flow in Q1 '06 up 54% over the same quarter last year.
See folks, it's not just the Gas manufactures making money in this industry. Take a look at any half way decent run energy company who is in the Coal/Oil/Natural Gas realm at this time. Profits and stock prices are up. They were in the right place at the right time. Many of you have heard of Hubbert's Peak from an article posted months ago on Nobrainer's site. This is one reason. It basically states that from this point on oil production can only go down. The last significant oil find was in the late 70's. Everything else is miniscule in the grand scheme in enabling us to match supply to the ever increasing US demand, much less that of the uber development occurring around the Pacific Rim (including China of course) and India. So basically we have increasing demand worldwide and decreasing supply. Last time I checked, any economist would tell you this means you can expect prices to go up. Unfortunately in this case, it's not something that can be righted as the market can't correct the supply side. Many folks say open Alaska or build more refineries. Well, have fun. There is a reason no one has built a refinery in the US in 20-30+ years, and the EPA weighs in strongly here along with the insane cost. Also, opening Alaska will mean that we live the good live for a little while and then we run out sooner. I'm guessing at some point someone in the middle east will get pissed enough to not sell to us. Fine, then we have a backup. Until the reserve is truly needed, hold it. Everyone still gets from point A to point B, our machines still run and every other product I use is plastic, was wrapped in it at one time, or has a part made from it. Apparently we can manage fine, it just costs a little more. Speaking of costing a little more, I have a comment on this as well:
I sell a commodity item, something that gas (since this is what so many people want to focus on) was. It quickly is becoming something much different. I sell many of my products at 15% mark up. When the metal markets went crazy a couple years ago (due to many of the same expanding markets) my prices went up. My mark up, by margin (percentage) stayed the same. The thing is 15% of 100 isn't as much as 15% of $125. If my cost is now $125, you are now gonna pay $143.75 instead of $115.00. So my cost went up 25% and so did yours but the volume gap is now $18.75 instead of $15.00 between my price and yours. Voila, my profits by volume increase on the same units sold, welcome to the wonderful world of inflation.
Is it unfair for the oil companies to make money this way on their many products? No! Right place, right time, barriers to entry, and previously taken risks in capital investments and product diversification covering a multitude of markets. Next time you hear about these guys making a ton of money congratulate them on a job well done, instead of chastising them, unless, of course, you've got a couple billion lying around to do some exploration, production, and refining after you've waited 10-20 years to clear the EPA and get your stuff actually built.